Design communication, community & success
In a large design department, how do we make sure we know what each other are doing? And why do we need to know?
When working for a large company, there’s always a feeling that you’re a small cog in a large machine. And in the case of customer-facing design work, it’s easy to forget that while the size of that machine may seem huge to us, it’s just a tiny pinprick in the consciousness of our customers. Our stores, our apps and services, the website — all competing with literally thousands of other brands, concerns and distractions every day.
And regardless of whether we are designing for customers or colleagues, everything we do is connected. Changes in one area can affect something in another — and sometimes in quite unpredictable ways.
Rocket surgery
Highly functional teams in critical situations — aircraft flight crews, operating theatre staff and the military, for example — all have one thing in common: people in the team communicate to others about their situations often, and in very small chunks. They don’t necessarily know if their status update is important to someone else, but if the information is short and regular it doesn’t matter if there’s a certain amount of noise.
But in the design world, it’s not possible to keep people similarly informed about the progress of features and functions, because that doesn’t lend itself to quick verbal updates unless everyone is already familiar with the details.
Meetings
A common complaint can be that meetings somehow get in the way of work. A variation on this is that you have nothing against meetings, just as long as you feel those meetings are relevant to your immediate tasks.
But good design teams in large companies have more meetings, not less.
Meetings are part of the work, because needing to know what others are up to, or think, or feel, is part of design in a team context. Needing to know stuff — however irrelevant it might feel at the time — is part of doing design in a complex organisation.
Variety
At Sainsbury’s, we encourage design shares as informal ways of showing each other work or talking about design problems — and plenty has been written about that elsewhere on the Internet.
But it’s not the only thing we do. To become more like airline pilots or rocket launch crews, we also use our chat systems throughout the day.
For example, a channel called “WAYWO” (What Are You Working On?). Every day, someone spins a wheel to choose somebody at random (there’s a plugin we use) and they decide the time to call it. Once called, screenshots, thoughts or just observations then come in from all over the team, and sometimes discussions arise about things that others see in those.
“Help, I need somebody” is another example — a channel dedicated to just asking questions. And then there’s simply the departmental chat channels in which sometimes we discuss design issues, but mostly other things,
Of course there’s plenty of ways we could improve, and particularly when it comes to sharing research results. But ultimately, it’s all about ways of working.
You may be a small cog in the machine, but that machine relies on you to function. And the key to a lot of that function is participation in a design community of communication.
